Dead to Rights sets itself up as a cop-turned-bad story and via
extension, also sets itself up to comparisons with one of the most
riveting (and under-appreciated) titles last year: Max Payne. Rights
tracks the story of Jack Slate who experiences a familial loss, that of
his father, to a random act of crime. Slate is then caught up in a
whirlwind story which will take him towards the route of vigilante
justice. It's got involving action and plenty of style. Slate not only
does slow-motion 'shootdodges' but is a competent martial arts man, able
to spring action fighter moves on his foes when disarmed. Cinematic
like Shenmue, Rights includes a host of mini-games to introduce variety,
including some pretty innovative ones and a K9 sidekick. Unfortunately,
Rights stumbles by giving us too much of what we don't want and too
little of what does work.

There's no denying that Rights has good technical qualities. All of the
graphics and sound feel on par with the best of the Xbox crop. The
first few missions have you going through a prison. Actually, you're
escaping it and naturally, the designers decided to disarm you so you
can try out your new martial arts moves. They're satisfying all the
same but some elements of Rights go on for too long. The never-ending
prison cells are testament to that complaint. Yes, it's very satisfying
to break the necks of your foes and even have your dog go at it too, but
there's a limit to how much fighting one person will want to handle.

The run and gun sequences for Rights are truly its best quality. It's
unfortunate that the developers didn't think so, despite working in a
competent targeting system. Ammunition and weapons are scarce, unless
you take them off your foes. Most of the 'boss' characters you face do
hand to hand (yes, whatever happened to Harrison Ford's approach
vis-à-vis Raiders of the Lost Ark?) but the game tends to favor throwing
goons who will come to the party packing and packing heavy. This
challenges you to use innovative tactics, like grabbing an opponent as a
human shield to fend off the enormous numbers you face. Rights is also
filled with a running gag of disarm techniques. Gag might not be a good
word because a lot of the disarming techniques are visceral. Basically,
when you're up close and weaponless against an opponent, you can do one
of several movie style actions where you reverse the situation with
fancy reflexes, take their gun and shoot them. You keep the gun
afterwards too to add to your ammo pool. It's an interesting gimmick to
force you to do stupid things (like get real close to someone instead of
shooting them far away) and it works similar to collecting special moves
in fighter games or spells in RPGs. This and the slow-motion sequences
prove Rights has ample cinematic flare, inspired or directly pilfered
from Asian action movies.

Keeping with the movie feel, Slate is able to dish out witty and
sardonic one-liners and some of Rights' action gimmicks are worked into
the game in an ever-sly manner. When Slate needs a diversion, you play
a little Dance Dance Revolution to get a stripper to do all the right
moves. That's an instance where the mini-game gamble paid off. It was
a short temporary pause from the action and the premise of the game
worked in seamlessly with the content. There are other portions of
Rights where this isn't so and then the mini-games turn into something
like Shenmue--just a game within a game.

By now, I'm sure you've detected how Rights can at once be brilliant but
at the same time falter on the next step. It's inconsistent and my
guess is, someone wanted to push this game into the 15-20 hour range
rather than settle for a short but engrossing 8-10 hours. This means a
lot of filler action pieces are put in to make Slate's life difficult.
But it proves to be doubly difficult because Rights is one of those
games where every battle is a pre-set conflict. It plays out scripted
so that in between two closely put together save points (thankfully
there are enough), you're in for a bout of intense action in which you
have to perform choreographed stunts and manoeuvres or risk suffering too
much damage to carry on to the next part. Some argue this type of
difficult is not 'real' difficulty, just hordes of enemies and fancy
reflexes a la Dragon's Lair. The difficulty, however, will escalate
exponentially as you get into the latter parts of the game. Be prepared
to spend hours trying to pass whole segments.

In the end, Rights has a lot more going for it. You've got fist
fighting, you've got control of a K9 sidekick, the usual assortment of
guns and the mini-games thrown in to give it a one-up, feature for
feature, over that other bad cop's revenge title. By virtue of all
these additions, I'm thinking the developers thought this would make
their piece of work more accessible to a larger audience; people who
would normally not touch a gun-blazing game. However, the escalated
difficulty of mixing all these together (now instead of one or two game
types, you have half a dozen) and inconsistency in pacing the sequences
ironically makes the holistic package less accessible. Ultimately,
Rights earns the 'right' to call itself a good game but whether it can
catapult itself to the pantheon of greatness is more of a debate.